A Splinter in Your Mind::
A Splinter in Your Mind
© 2004 by Jonathan Zap
Editor: Austin Iredale
Revised:
2008
...there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad
(adapted
from The Matrix)
I just came across a college paper I wrote in 1975,
when I was seventeen years old, entitled, "Shakespearean Philosophy and
the Greenworld." Referring to
Shakespeare's philosophy I wrote,
"Man was originally designed to live in a completely natural state, in
the Garden of Eden or the Golden Age. .... An important concept in considering
the levels of nature is the wheel of fortune or the cosmic wheel. .... This
lower order of nature is an amoral force that moves in cyclical patterns
imitating the movements of the stars. The movement of this amoral force
produces not only the cycles of seasons and days, but also in human life, the
cycles of prosperity and decline that constitute the wheel of fortune. At the
very top of the wheel is the perfect order of the Golden Age and at the bottom
is a state of nonbeing or nothingness."
It seemed almost eerie to find that nearly thirty
years ago I was already preoccupied with and writing about the feeling that
ours is a fallen time, and that a Golden Age, a greener world than this, is a
plane of reality that resonates with both past and future. In Return of the
King, Tolkien writes, "Hope and memory shall live still in some hidden
valley where the grass is green."
In Shakespeare's plays, the "Green
World" (a term coined by literary critic Northrope Frye) is a place in
the woods where cosmopolitan, neurotic characters go (especially in comedies
like A Midsummer's Night Dream and As You Like It), and
genders get swapped through cross-dressing, fairies, elves and visions appear,
and somehow the city characters get their psyches and relationships sorted out.
We may experience a similar longing for the
Green World via our desires to be out in nature, go on a wilderness sojourn, attend a Rainbow
gathering, or experience the realm of
Middle Earth through a book or movie (among countless other examples).
We also have a part of our intuition that registers a
general wrongness about this world. Hamlet says, "This time is out of
joint." And "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
Some of the most memorable spoken lines of our era are from the first Matrix
movie, "There is a splinter in your mind you can't get out." and
"It is the world that has
been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth." The Matrix and Tolkien's
mythology share a belief with the ancient Gnostics that the realm we have
incarnated in is largely a diabolical deception or intrinsically corrupted
plane. Tolkien wrote in his notes, "But nothing, as has been said,
utterly avoids the Shadow upon Arda (earth) or is wholly unmarred, so as to
proceed unhindered upon its right courses."
This idea that reality itself is "off"
has come to permeate popular culture. A few years ago a movie came out
entitled, "Reality Bites." Ironically this awful movie
embodied the shallow narcissism that is a big part of why this
reality bites.
In a letter Tolkien wrote, "...but
certainly there was an Eden
on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing
it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most
humane, is still soaked with the sense of exile." When we perceive the
darkness of this realm we are not always altogether filled with despair,
because we have both past and future memories of another plane of reality. As a
character in a fallen world in Stephen King's Dark Tower
series says before falling into an abyss, "Go then, there are other
worlds than these."
A few years ago someone described to me an out of body experience which
involved seeing what appeared to be the earth from a disembodied POV out in
space. At first they see the earth that we are all familiar with. An eclipse
passes and afterwards they see the same planet, but now it is completely green,
all signs of human spoilage gone. Two weeks ago in a motel room in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, I had an out of body experience and got to
experience the Green World for a few seconds. Apparently, Robert Monroe,
the pioneer researcher of out of body eperiences has described something
similar. Sometimes perceptions that there are other worlds than these comes
through a deep perception of wrongness in this reality, a negative implying a
positive. I can remember moments growing up in the Bronx and stepping out into
hazy, humid air, the sound of jack hammers and sirens, cracked concrete and
asphalt, my whole body and being registering that this was a fallen world, a
dark possibility amidst an array of parallel alternatives.
Even science now affirms that this is not the only
channel offered on the holographic cable television of eleven dimensional
superstrings vibrating hyperspatially through the multiverse.
I remember an old New Yorker cartoon that shows
an exasperated father fixing a flat tire in the rain while two petulant
children stare at him from the car windows. The father is exclaiming, "No,
you don't understand, this is reality, you can't switch to another
channel." Maybe, maybe not. The father and the kids each have half the
perception. We can't always switch the channel when we want it to, but
sometimes we can, and more often the channel switches by itself. In a few hours
you will get tired and your incarnation channel will switch to the dreamtime
whether you want it to or not, whether you remember or not.
As I discussed in my previous email, "The
Mutant versus The Machine and the End of the Iron Age"(should be
posted to website soon) there is evidence that suggests that we are living at
the cusp of a great cycle shift, and that a great age of darkness, variously
called the fallen world, Kali Yuga, Iron Age, History, or Babylon Matrix is
about to shift into a new Golden Age. We may or may not live to experience it
in our present bodily forms and ego identities, but then again our present
bodily forms and ego identities are largely artifacts of the Matrix. I'm
willing to trade mine in for an upgrade when the cycle shifts, and whether it
is nuclear armageddon, mutant virus, asteroid, climatic apocalypse, or that SUV
I didn't notice bearing down on me when I cross the street, the reset button
will get pressed (with or without eschaton as we have the guaranteed escape
hatch called death----the attribute that, in the Tolkien mythology, made man
more blessed than the elves). One way or another the cycle will shift and life
will reanimate out of the dark compression of the fallen world.
In Return of the King, Gandalf says to Aragorn
as he points out a tree growing out of the snow, "Turn your face from
the green world, and look where all seems barren and cold! Yet the life within
may then lie sleeping through many long years, and none can foretell the time
in which it will awake."
We may not be able to choose the time of
collective rebirth, and intensified darkness will likely precede the dawn, but
we can choose whether we are attuned to life channels or death channels. As the
Dylan lyric says, "He who's not busy being born, is busy dying."
I've been noticing bumper stickers saying variations
of, "The end of the world is near, look busy." To surf the
tsunami of cataclysmic change, to stay just ahead of the curve, we need to be
very busy being born, which also means being busy dying to our denser
identifications and false personality structures. I will have much more to say
about this in my upcoming Tolkien study, Casting Precious into the Cracks of
Doom---Androgny, Alchemy, Evolution, and the One Ring, but here
is a brief preview:
Tolkien wrote in a letter, "It is a fallen
world, and there is no consonance between our bodies, minds and souls."
This is a dissonance we can begin to heal right now by expanding our awareness.
As Aristophanes suggests in Plato's Symposium, we may once have
contained both genders, but in this fallen world our wholeness was shattered
and we are (mostly) born into this realm fractured into one gender only.
Consequently we tend toward an addictive, voracious hunger for some other type
of person that we falsely believe will complete us. We hunger for The
Precious, often in the form of The Hottie, and our obsession with
obtaining The Hottie can burn holes in our mind and turn us into a wraith. (see
Stop the Hottie!)Wholeness can only be found within, where it
already exists, as biologically and alchemically we already have masculine and
feminine within, yin and yang, and it is through the inner alchemical marriage
of yin and yang that we rediscover our wholeness. Tolkien writes in a letter, "This
is a fallen world. The dislocation of sex instinct is on of the chief symptoms
of the Fall." Libido, as Jung used the term (not as Freud who confined
it to sex) is our life drive. The binding attribute of the Matrix in this time
is the powerfully conditioned tendency for our life drive to be subverted, and lost
in a focus on obtaining the external object, "The Precious,"
which might be the shiny, new Ford Stomper SUV, money, worldly power or The
Hottie. In each case we are caught in the centrifugal pull of our time,
spinning us out into the outer darkness while the path of wholeness,
empowerment, individuation and love require a centripetal withdrawal of
projections onto the world and a rediscovery of our own essence.
Through shadow projection we project our darkness onto
the world and blame the general darkness on specific others. Through
disconnection with our inner androgyny we project wholeness onto The Hottie and
feel we need them to be our savior. A typical case is that of a heterosexual
man out of touch with his feminine who sees a beautiful woman and projects his
soul on to her and feels he has known her from other lifetimes and that they
are destined to be together. Once in a while this projection may be onto an
actual soul mate, if so, the unconscious projection will still interfere with
establishing an authentic relationship with an actual person. Tolkien, in a
letter, writes about young men needing to see women "as companions in
shipwreck not guiding stars."
We don't need to wait for the golden age to form the
gold elixir of alchemy, the liberated spirit body that comes into being when we
rediscover our inner wholeness. We can remove the splinter from our mind, even
as we continue to incarnate in a splintered world.
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